Growing Exponentially — Working at a Japanese tech startup
I started off interviewing at the very beginning of the pandemic as it was certain that my plans for pursuing masters wouldn’t be possible for another year, at which point I came across Nakajima-san and his firm, p2p.inc, a Japanese tech startup which specializes purely in everything to with streaming audio and video streaming over the web.
The Difficult part
Getting started with any new work environment is tough, and it's especially tough if you are surrounded by extremely competent senior developers who expect really good quality code out of you. I joined this firm with the plans of working as a C developer writing interfaces for a virtual device driver which would enable noise reduction system-wide for our customers, however — a month down the line, I found myself working on the web app, with the noise reduction module kept as a back burner.
Being unfamiliar with the intricacies of writing production-level code, and the toughened work environment only meant that you get extremely critical PR reviews, back to back and you start questioning your competence of being a good developer. This was probably the lowest of the low points I have had in months, as the reviews for PR’s seemingly remained the same and I had no other junior developer as an aide, I felt like a Cesena in a team of Airbus A380's..
Tough Love
In these cases, most managers over at Indian firms would handle these cases in either of the two ways
- Fire the employee, move on and hire someone else, rinse and repeat
- Empathize with the employee and cut them slack altogether, by telling them they are a junior developer after all, and they will learn with time.
Well, Nakajima-san’s mentorship is unlike both the approaches. I have never been played the “you will be fired” card, but haven't been sympathized with either — it was always “I expect better than this, you can do it.” and his only expectation was, I throw more time at solving the problem the correct way, rather than throw a whole bunch of duct-taped solutions at the problems which would burst later down the line.
I still remember this one line, which now I laugh when I look back, where after I messed up some code big time, Nakajima-san told me “We are not making a school project here”.
The Good part
Being surrounded with extremely competent peers and mentors always meant that if I put in the time and effort to address PR reviews as expected, at some point or the other, I would reach the level of competency where I would write code which directly the same thought process as my co-workers would judge my code as.
Regardless of the tough approach, Nakajima-san and the team held their trust high, and allowed me to pick up heavier issues as we went forward — to the extent that I was allowed to be the primary developer for their desktop app! Even Nakajima-san knew I had never worked with electron before, they let me work on it primarily and I went from doubting my competency to actually being proud of the code written by me!
While the approach over here is perfection focused, I feel, if you have the drive to actually put in the work, such an environment combined with the right leadership boosts your competency as a developer to a league of its own. I feel I have probably learned more here in the 9 months of working than I would have in working for two years at another firm.
I never felt bogged down with a single role, I have the chance to explore pretty much whatever I wish to at this point — have worked with interfacing things like Sentry, auto-update modules, and making sure your builds are sent over to the customer’s machine and downloaded silently in the background, to actually working on major subsystems of the entire ecosystem from the ground up! I was allowed to work on it all.
I owe it all to the trust put in by Nakajima-san and really solid mentorship by colleagues like Leonardo Carreiro
